All you need is lunch
Time is precious, and with precisely 43 minutes to eat lunch on an open campus, some students wonder why lunch cannot be extended.
“It’s pretty short,” sophomore Ellie Eaton said, “when I’m out with people getting lunch [off campus] we don’t have that much time.”
Even for people who stay on campus, the time allotted for lunch can seem too short, “The [cafeteria] lines are always so long, so it takes a long time to get your lunch. By the time you actually get your lunch you only have ten minutes,” sophomore Alex Raya said.
Junior Lin Yang has observed a number of students walking into fifth period late. “They come in five minutes late and most people have food with them. One guy walked into fifth period with half a burrito and a can of Arizona. The teacher certainly wasn’t thrilled,” Yang said.
Students such as sophomore Nilesh Haile propose that lunch “should be extended another ten minutes.”
Sophomore Shauna Simone agrees, “We have an open campus, but there is no time to use it if you don’t have a car.”
Another benefit to a longer lunch is that “we would be more inclined to get to class on time, and we would eat slower and not burp as much. It would encourage healthy digestions.” junior Danya Axelrad-Hausman said.
Unfortunately, changing the amount of time for lunch isn’t so easy. “If you want to expand the lunchtime, you have to expand the day,” Principal Jacquelyn Moore said.
According to Moore, every school is required to provide a set number of instructional minutes.
If ten minutes were to be added to lunch, the outcome of extra school time would be around 29 hours based on DHS’s 175 day school year.
For Moore to subtract five instructional days from the school year she would have to negotiate with unions, something she described as a complicated process.
DHS teachers seemed reluctant to make the change. “School is too long already,” math teacher David Blackwell said. “To make lunch longer is to lengthen the day. Think 7:45 to 3:30 is [already] a long day with seven periods.”
While students are free to leave school once the last bell rings, teachers are required to stay an extra thirty minutes after school officially ends. One long day for a student means an extra long day for a teacher, not including any added time for lunch.
History teacher Fern O’Brien added, “If the rationale is that there isn’t enough time to get lunch, kids should just pack their own lunch and save parents the cash.” Although she says she could use the lengthened lunch to prep, O’Brien is “fine with [lunch now]. It’s neither too long, nor too short.”
